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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Administering
Managing features
You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
Marketing
To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
Administering marketing email activities
If your site uses the Marketing tool in Management Center to send email activities and dialog activities, you must perform some configuration tasks.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- Planning
  Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
- Installing
  Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  - Overview of administering a WebSphere Commerce site
    In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
  - WebSphere Commerce instance
    Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.
  - Managing features
    You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
    - Catalogs
      You can administer catalog features such as the attribute dictionary and categories.
    - Marketing
      To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
      - Configuring marketing for Management Center
        Before business users begin using marketing features in Management Center, a site administrator must perform a number of administrative tasks. These tasks enable and configure key features of the Marketing tool, including web and dialog activities, email activities, marketing statistics, and marketing experiments.
      - Working with the marketing component configuration file
        Some Management Center components, like the marketing component, have customizable configuration files. These files contain properties that control certain component features.
      - Administering marketing statistics
        To ensure that business users can see up-to-date marketing statistics in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
      - Administering marketing email activities
        If your site uses the Marketing tool in Management Center to send email activities and dialog activities, you must perform some configuration tasks.
        Configuring email activity accounts
        To support sending marketing emails for your store, you must use the Administration Console to configure outbound and inbound email activity accounts.
        Improving Email activity sending performance
        You can set two parameters in the EMLMSG database table that can improve performance when you use Email or Dialog activities to send marketing emails.
        Configuring your store to avoid sending multiple marketing e-mails to the same email address
        You can add an attribute to the WebSphere Commerce configuration file to prevent the server from sending multiple emails to the same address for the same email activity. This attribute can prevent the server from sending the emails even when the email address belongs to different users. This configuration ensures that a customer who registers as more than one user but supplies the same email address for each user receives only one email per email activity.
        Forcing email activities to be sent right away during testing
        To avoid waiting for the scheduled email send time to arrive in an authoring or staging environment, you can run SQL statements to set the send time to the current time. The SQL statements temporarily override the Time to start delivery field value that is set in the Administration Console for the email account.
        Viewing emails that were not delivered
        When an email or dialog activity runs, emails can fail to be delivered for a number of reasons. You can query the WebSphere Commerce database to view details about the delivery of emails for the activity. For instance, you can view whether an email was opened, clicked, or bounced back to the sender. You can also view the email addresses that are associated with emails that were opened, clicked, or that bounced-back.
      - Testing web and dialog activities
        Test web and dialog activities in your authoring or staging server to ensure that the activities produce the right result before publishing them to the production server.
      - Defining image map HTML
        When you are creating or changing marketing content that is an image, you can create the image as an image map. An image map provides Marketing Managers with the capability of specifying multiple click actions areas within a single image.
      - Substitution variables for entering HTML in Management Center
        In the Marketing tool, you can use substitution variables in marketing content HTML to improve the handling of links to store pages and files from the marketing content. By using these substitution variables, you can use the same HTML in your store preview and production storefront without changing the context root. The marketing engine dynamically replaces these variables with the correct context root information.
      - Creating substitution parameters for image paths in CKEditor content
        If your site uses CKEditor, you can create a substitution parameter to represent the variable part of an image path. When business users enter HTML content in CKEditor, they can use the substitution parameter in the image path.
      - Checking when a dialog activity was last processed
        You can view a timestamp in the DMACTATTR table that indicates the last time the trigger for a specific dialog activity was processed. This timestamp applies only to daily check triggers that run once a day. For example, if you want to know the last time the Customer Celebrates Birthday trigger was processed for a specific dialog activity, you can run an SQL statement to check the timestamp.
      - Deactivating or deleting expired Web activities for better performance
        To improve runtime performance, make sure to either delete or deactivate expired Web activities on a regular basis. This ensures that the WebSphere Commerce server does not waste resources checking the schedules of expired Web activities when evaluating what to display in an e-Marketing Spot.
      - Setting up the customer segment export feature
        As a site administrator, you can connect the authoring environment with the production environment so business users can export customer segment information from the production environment. By retrieving and exporting the customer information from the production environment, the customer segment export file includes the most recent information for the customers in a segment.
    - Promotions
      You can administer promotion features such as creating or deleting promotion folders and configuring the promotions engine.
    - Workspaces
      You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
    - Price rules and price lists
      A Site Administrator must perform a series of tasks to enable and configure price rules and price lists in Management Center.
    - Catalog filters
      As Site Administrator, you might be required to assist business users with certain catalog filter tasks that relate to the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center.
    - Negotiated pricing
      To use negotiated pricing, you must have a nominal cost price list that is defined for your store.
    - Store preview functions
      You can administer store preview functions such as enabling and disabling commands and views, and adding a customized business context.
    - Order management
      As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.
    - Request For Quote (RFQ) trading
      As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.
    - User traffic
      Edit the WebSphere Commerce configuration file to set the level of caching performed on user traffic data. The default number of URLs in the cache is 20. If this number is too low for your site, for example, if your site is very busy and you are concerned about performance impacts, you can increase the cache size. User traffic data is used in some operational reports.
    - Catalog and marketing attachments
      As a Site Administrator, you can manage the catalog and marketing attachments, such as for adding attachment usages, changing managed file updater parameters, or deleting attachments.
    - Inventory sharing in extended sites stores (non-ATP)
      The extended sites business model provides scalability and manageability improvements for WebSphere Commerce sites where there are multiple stores which can share assets including non-ATP inventory. The sharing of non-ATP inventory reduces the complexity of managing inventory assets for all the stores in the site. All stores in extended sites can share inventory from a single asset store with distributed fulfillment centers.
    - Tax sharing in extended sites stores
      In extended sites store model, tax assets can be shared between the extended site asset store and the extended site store. You can manage the tax assets in an extended site store in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
  - Logging services
    WebSphere Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
  - Business auditing
    Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a WebSphere Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
  - Business events
    Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
  - Staging server
    The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production server.
  - WebSphere Commerce database
    As a site administrator, maintain the WebSphere Commerce database and ensure that any WebSphere Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
  - Extracting, transforming, and loading data
    WebSphere Commerce provides multiple utilities for preparing and loading data into a WebSphere Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the WebSphere Commerce schema.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - WebSphere Commerce Search
    For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce Search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks, which include search index management and ongoing maintenance.
  - Deploying a WebSphere Commerce dual cell environment
    Consider deploying a dual cell environment to achieve continuous availability and ensure that shoppers are minimally affected by planned or unplanned outages.
  - IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
    IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
- Developing
  The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
- Troubleshooting

Administering marketing email activities in Management Center

If your site uses the Marketing tool in Management Center to send email activities and dialog activities, you must perform some configuration tasks.